A football miscellany

A warning to our non-sports fan readers: there's a high risk of increased blogging here about Manchester United over the next few days. That subject kept us going through the 2003 silly season and is working its way back onto our agenda. The basic setting hasn't changed a whole lot since the days when Beckhamania gripped the world: there was life after Beckham in Manchester, and the club still has a complicated ownership structure in which the definitive Oirishmen own 30 percent of it, and Tampa Bay Buccaneers owner Malcolm Glazer owns about 20 percent.

It is now believed that Glazer intends to bid for full ownership of the club, and Man Utd fans are rightly worried about their team being subject to the whims of rich foreign businessmen who dabble in other sports and will move along once the next big thing comes along ... which is basically the current situation with the two Oirishmen. But it's a fair argument that Glazer would be worse: his closest previous interaction with soccer would be the Argentinian kicker on his (American) football team, and his Tampa team is displaying the classic plaything symptoms. After a Superbowl two years ago, they failed to make the playoffs last year and will have trouble scraping together even a handful of victories this year.

As the more sane financial analysts have pointed out, much of the hype that drove the high valuations of sports teams has dissipated over the last year. It's not clear that Beckham would have made any difference, but MU have fallen short of their championship standards since he left, and all of Europe's big clubs had an ugly 2003-04, which finished with the European Champions League trophy being contested by ...er.. Monaco and Porto. By that point, the players for Real Madrid, AC Milan, Bayern Munich, Man Utd, and Arsenal had, as the Americans say, hit the golf course.

And Beckham's own star has fallen so much that today's Sun depicts his head, courtesy of a negative comment from Posh about his dancing ability, superimposed on the body of David Brent from the classic dancing scene from The Office. And one final sign of the globalised, cross-branded sports world: Arsenal's new stadium is to be called Emirates Stadium, via their new Gulf airline sponsor. As we said before: English football is now leased out.